Basic Instinct is
Paul Verhoeven’s controversial 1992 offering to the world. Starring Michael
Douglas and Sharon Stone, it is widely regarded as the film that broke
Stone as a bonafide Hollywood star.
What might, at this point,
sound like an attractive film to anyone who hasn’t seen it, the movie is
actually highly problematic. It sheds light on the misogyny inherent to
Hollywood and society in the ’90s. It also contains what has been regarded as
embedded homophobia, with depictions of graphic anti-homo$xual violence thus
gaining widespread fury from LGBTQIA+ groups upon release.
Famed feminist academic
Camille Paglia argued against the protests and posited that Stone’s performance
was “one of the great performances by a woman in screen history”, praising her
character as “a great vamp figure, like Mona Lisa herself, like a pagan
goddess”.
Regardless of the stir that it
caused, even to this day, it became the film that would become most closely
associated with Stone. Although she had previously come to mainstream
prominence starring alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Verhoeven’s Total
Recall in 1990, Basic Instinct broke Stone as
an international “&sx symbol”. Today, even the term “&sx symbol” leaves a sour
taste in the mouth.
